Seriously, when the Atacama Desert in Chile gets snow for the second time in living memory (first time was 2011, 36 inches; this year, 18 inches and increasing) and it shuts down the roads, you know that something is up.

Well, it’s just Ma Nature’s way of cooling herself off with some snowflakes instead of a cold beer.

Ex-PH2, just run a search for “Maunder Minimum.” There’s some discussion that we may be headed into another one…leftists will, of course, continue to deny that the big ball of fire in the sky has anything to do with the temperature on Earth.

I read a report earlier this week that some climate scientists are now predicting an extended cooling period until 2050 or so. I suppose the chicken little liberals will now have to get all alarmed about global cooling, advancing glaciation, reduced agricultural output, etc.

Seriously, what is it about those people that they simply must keep their panties in a wad about something? I’m surprised they haven’t started a movement to stop the horrors of plate techtonics.

The problem with the global warming crowd is that they try to use pot science to scare people into believing a bad situation ( air and other polution) is worse than it is with their chicken little stories. The Earth’s climate charges constantly on it’s own. Even the earth’s polarity have flipped at least 150 times in the past 5 million years.

@13, Poetrooper, a central part of being liberal is to NEVER be happy, content, or satisfied with anything in this life!

As for the enviro-doomsday crowd, meh, I remember the dogma they were selling me when i was in college in the late 80’s. Back then, the “experts” were certain that about 80% of humanity would be dead by 2000, as well as at least 60% of all plant and animal species being extinct by then due to acid rain, ozone depletion, deforestation, and overpopulation. Yes overpopulation is still a problem, but right now, we have more forested acreage in the USA than we did in the 1930’s, we don’t hear about acid rain anymore, and the hole in the ozone layer? Yep, gone, too! HEY, waitiminnit, wasn’t Al Gore Jr. bawling just a few years ago about how polar bears were threatened with extinction due to the polar ice caps melting? HEY, the Antarctic ice caps have been growing for the past few years, and now the Arctic caps have been growing this year!! And just a few years ago, astronomers were observing the polar ice caps on Mars melting, and there isn’t a single factory, power plant, or SUV there to blame for it!! As for the polar bears, they’re just fine, they even have a hunting season on ‘em in some parts of Canada!

@11 – I have an entire book devoted to papers presented at a conference on the Medieval Warming Period, which preceded the Little Ice Age. The Maunder Minimum? The sun shut down on sunspot production for about 19 months from the fall of 2008 to March 2010. Scared the bejeebus out of NASA scientists. It was preceded by the biggest, brightest, nastiest CME they’d seen in a VERY long time. Now there is a newly-discovered gas giant orbiting a young star (16.5M years old, a mere infant) at 93AU, the WRONG distance for a gas giant to form. The whimpering over having to ‘rethink’ planet formation was so sad.

One climate scientst made a blanket statement in 2005 that only pancake ice can form on rivers, therefore, the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, with ‘growlers’ (big chunks) in the river, is completely incorrect. So I sent him a new story with several photographs of a river in North Dakota with growlers floating in it and told him he was wrong.

Bottom line: Scientists have tunnel vision; the more advanced their degrees, the less imagination they have (there are exceptions to this); and they don’t even look at their own charts the way they should.

5200 BC, there was a cold snap. The Atacama ice cap formed. Ootzi the Iceman went for a long and desperate hike, equipped with everything from a bow and quiver of arrows to a very expensive, solid copper=headed axe. Someone killed him. He was on his way to plead with the gods to help his clan, because the climate had collapsed.

Oh, yeah — mud cores from the Atlantic show that the climate in the Sahara can switch from desert to lush, green wet savannahs in the space of one generation. The changes are abrupt. We have no preparation for dealing with them.

Thank you for the complement. When I was writing it, I didn’t know who the heck the wannabe freshman from Chicago was. Looks like I shouldn’t have been focusing so much on The Bitch.

As for the whole global warming thing, there are theories going in the scifi author circles about that. Those theories are that we are currently in the middle (or going into) a mini-ice age. The only thing keeping it away is the greenhouse gasses that we are producing. Well, since we have slowed global production of greenhouse gasses because of global warming, things seem to have gotten a bit cooler.

Also, during the transition (I am a believer that we are going into the mini ice age) there would be a greater inclement weather pattern (like bigger hurricanes and tornadoes). You know, like we have been seeing in the past few years.

I swear every time I see a news article on global warming, it reminds me of the dystopian society in 1984. In that society, Big Brother, the state news mouthpiece, regularly makes bafflingly random changes in toon-suddenly, this policy is bad, now that one is good. Then, vice versa. This is the correct historical version of events, now that one is. Thankfully, the global warming establishment isn’t as influential as Big Brother. But the tactics sure are similar. Take how the Antarctic sea ice is now at record levels (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/09/23/antarctic-sea-ice-hit-35-year-record-high-saturday/). A lot of scientists are now saying it likely involves wind patterns creating better conditions for sea ice formation. Others are saying that the warmth is being contained sponge-like by the deep sea. Yeah, well, here’s the interesting thing: the deep sea is a huge area of mystery towards which little study has been directed. And in the current state of the economy and most countries’ budgets, it’s unlikely that grants are going to fall out of the sky to do groundbreaking research anytime soon. And as for atmospheric winds; NOAA and NASA have had their budgets cut massively, so probably no luck there, either. This seems to be a stopgap measure until the climate change theory can be adjusted so there’s just enough uncertainty to keep up the scaremongering. Ah well, volume and ad hominem insults are an acceptable substitute for logic and sound science, right? Right?

Flagwaver, climate science is based computer modeling. Computers use a binary code. It’s not intuitive. Just as astrophysicists are finding that their planetary formation science is as full of holes as Swiss cheese, climate science is finding that its precious computer models don’t come up to scratch. Just think, they spent all that money on their education, when a bit of common sense could have done the job just as well. And they refuse to give up the computer’s results.

So where are we headed? Anything is possible, but since it’s illogical to do an ‘average’ of glaciation and warming trends over the last 600,000 years, I can tell you that we are a little over halfway through the shortest period of warming on record, the Aftonian. 30,000 years of warming took place 300,000 years ago, around the time modern humans arrived. So far, we’ve seen 18,000 years of warming trend.

All warming phases have bouts of temperature reversals. At some point, they all hit a critical peak and take a rapid plunge into a full ice age.

For the record the Aftonian warming period followed the 140,000 years of the Nebraska ice advance. Averaging those ice-ups and warmups is a falsehood and amounts to pseudo-science BS. It’s the climate scientists who do the averaging.

I have a chart showing why it’s ridiculous to use an average on ice advances and warming periods.

@22 Flagwaver, first let me say that it’s an honor (assuming I’m not being fucked with here), and that “Centurion” is my all-time favorite book and should be required reading in every high school.

Have you ever thought about movie rights for it? Then again, there’s probably no movie studio that could be trusted not to dick it up. God knows Michael Bay would just dumb it down, PC-ify it, and use it as an excuse to blow shit up for no apparent reason. And HBO would probably do worse.

I have snoveled show off my front steps, sidewalk, and brushed same show off my car. I have confirmed that the car door will open without the use of a flamethrower. Shiny black squirrel has helped herself to the bird food I put out. Show continues to fall, which will require more snoveling.

I will fix chix noodle soup and Spam sammiches after I get back from taking Mikey to Petsmart to make his Christmas donation to the cat people. Then I will snovel more show and doo kneep dee bends.

We’re getting global warming flakes in Michigan now, with a balmy 15-20mph wind. Can’t hardly see the end of the driveway for the flakes. I’ve already used the warming blower once, and it looks like it’ll require another pass in about an hour or two.

CC Senior: yeppers. During the 1970s, global cooling was the big “scare”. It was one of the arguments against superdsonic passenger aircraft – some scientists predicted that the particulate matter and water from their exhaust in the low/mid stratosphere (they were projected to fly higher than subsonic passenger aircraft) would reflect enough solar radiation back to space to “flip the switch” and start a new ice age.

My money is on Sol as the driver. I’m reasonably sure that the sun is just a bit more variable than we realize – e.g., multiple variance cycles, with some measured in millenia as well as some measured in centuries. And “a bit more variable” is all it would take to have a huge effect on earth’s climate.

@ Ex-PH2 (#24): The current issues with computational models (of climate and other scientific areas) are complex, and often involve everything from inaccurate mathematical assumptions, lack of precise input data and programming errors. But to say ‘it’s binary code; it’s just not intuitive’ isn’t really accurate. That’s akin to saying spoken language is just vibrations of mucous membranes in the throat, and thus just not intuitive. People program systems in ‘high-level’ languages that DO make a lot of sense, and can describe the underlying physics -to the extent they’re known- pretty well.

Bear in mind the same types of physics that model the climate are also modeling things like jet engines in newer planes, and those still fly – the mathematical methods are often (provably) sound, and getting back to climate science, where the issues arise is due to oversimplified models (by necessity; the earth is a pretty big thing to study!), programming errors (few, but not none) and a lot of ground left to discover. Things like ice physics, radiation schemes, vegetation effects, etc. On the whole, though, they’re getting increasingly accurate, but it’s a slow convergence due to the complexity of the field.

I should also point out that “Global Warming” isn’t a phrase that’s been used for ages amongst actual scientists – they study ‘global climate change’. You can, somewhat understandably, say that’s because the warming isn’t absolute and they’re backing away from the term, but in reality it’s more to do with the complex cycles the planet has with respect to these dynamics. It’s a big like rhythms in the brain – we have alpha, theta, gamma, etc. Each plays a different role at a different frequency. Same with cooling and warming cycles on the Earth. Just as people here find the media propagating ridiculous notions about veterans and the military because stories get oversimplified, the same is true of ‘global warming’ scientists when somebody sticks their hand out a window in Cairo and feels snow.

LC: correct. There’s a good reason many weather models now require a supercomputer to run. They really are that complex, are very detailed – and still in general aren’t complex enough to have good fidelity past the next day or two. Reality truly is that big and complex, and predicting weather is one of the more complex big problems out there.

Predicting the weather is hugely more complex than modeling the aerodynamic performance of a new aircraft design. We can do the latter quite well. We’re not yet there on the former.

And until we understand – and can accurately model – the former, I don’t think we have a prayer of modeling the long term climate. And maybe not even then if Sol is as variable as I suspect and has multiple, centuries- and millenia-long interacting variability cycles.

LC, I’ll accept your argument with a ‘but’, that being that a closed system that is as complex as this planet’s requires more than just computer modeling, just as ‘averaging’ ice sheet advances and retreats at 100,000 years gives a false and biased result, when there is, in fact, NO average.

Climate science is in its infancy. It started back in the IGY (1957-58) and has a long way to go, just as planetary formation modeling and solar system formation are based on the assumption that things happen only one way, the accretion disc. That assumption fails to take into account direct observation discoveries like the HD106906 system, which has a gas giant in orbit around a very young central star.

Planetary systems are not simple, one-way-only things, whether they are climate-related or otherwise. Computer modeling can only go so far, and in the end, it does all track back to binary codes, no matter how complex they are.

The only reason weather forecasting has become more accurate, as an example, is the use of sensory equipment such as Doppler radar, barometric pressure gauges, humidity and wind speed sensors, but it still does not explain why a tornado will go from an EF-0 to EF-5 in almost the blink of an eye, or a hurricane will veer off the predicted path and cause less damage, or more, than was predicted and why it isn’t WHERE it was predicted. And remember, science still hasn’t acquired the ability to predict earthquakes.

Oh, yes, the more we know about Earth as a closed system, the more likely we are to be able to determine what future planets can be colonized successfully. But as the ‘gas giant in the wrong place’ story clearly demonstrates, there is a bodacious amount of stuff yet to be discovered that no computer model can predict or speculate on, no matter how complex its programming.

As an example, Einstein’s theory of relativity says nothing can move faster than the speed of light. He also said that space can be warped. Warped space has been found and photographed by Hubble, showing light warped around a galaxy by the mass of the galaxy. However, as Miguel Alcubierre demonstrated in 1994 with his warp bubble formula, there is no need for a starship to move at all through space; the ship need only bend or warp space in front of it, and the space behind it will allow the ship to surf through space at any speed its crew chooses to use. The warp bubble formula also shows that time travel is possible, as was predicted by Robert Heinlein in ‘Have Spacesuit – Will Travel’. NASA is currently investigating the Alcubierre warp bubble formula in the lab. All of this

No computer could formulate or predict or speculate on any of Einstein’s or Alcubierre’s intuitive guesses and theories.

Make use of one of the four forces of physics and you will walk through walls (electromagnetism), enjoy the benefits of antigravity (gravity), create a nuclear weapon (weak force) or discover the basic structure of the universe (strong force). Computers don’t do these things. They have no imaginations.

Oh, yeah, while I was running errands and picking up birdfood for the shiny black secretive squirrel to steal, the snow total went from the predicte 1.7″ to (now) 5 inches. I now have a baker’s dozen purple finches, two cardinals and multiple species of sparrows stuffing themselves at my expense and amusing my cats.

@35. The sparrows and finches were so hungry today that they didn’t bother to take off when our Jack Russell chased them, they just waited for the snow to get deep enough to make her stop. Our cats haven’t ventured out of the house for 3 days now.

It finally stopped snowing, for now. Next up, lake effect, which is still snow.
I’m good on food, liquid refreshments and heat. The pellet stove has it a nice 72 degrees in the house, and the furnace hasn’t run since early this morning.

We are still getting snow where I am in NYC, the joy is the heat for the building went out. So glad I had my woobie with me.

One of the issues with computer modeling is the number of dimensions involved in the calculations. The horrid model that suggested Nuclear Winter was basically a two-dimensional model that was horrid. Early climate models tried to have the atmosphere matching the Earth’s rotation, and to be a unified whole. They are still trying to figure out how many layers there are on a regular basis, and to account for the different movements of each. The complexity is mind-boggling, and developing truly accurate models is still further away than they would like. Had some interesting conversations with the folks at the Argonne advanced computing center as they let me explore their “Holodeck” on a visit. The good thing is, they were excited about all the negatives, as it gave an idea of where to go and how far we still had to go.

Laughing Wolf, the record balloon freefall jump by Felix Baumgartner may have given them some kind of clue.

I was fascinated by the temperature changes from one layer and level to another, and also that the ballon itself floated up and down when it hit the upper atmosphere boundary, to keep its temperature stable. It warmed and rose, then cooled and sank.

Some years ago, I did a bit of work supporting the computational infrastructure for a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) project. While doing that, I had the chance to talk to a guy who was educated as a metrologist.

Turns out that the best weather models today work much the same way as CFD models – that is, they break the surface of the earth into many small 3-D “cells”. These cells have initial conditions, and they interact with the surface of the earth. Each cell thus affects adjacent cells.

The more cells, the better the representation of reality and thus the more accurate. But each cell requires computational power to run the model.

For an aircraft, there may be tens of thousands to millions of cells. That’s necessary to get high fidelity – at a particular Mach number/orientation combination. The Model is run repeatedly with varying orientations/Mach numbers to characterize an aircraft’s performance.

The earth (or even a city) is hugely bigger than an aircraft – so even with mile square (or even 10-square-mile) cells, you have a sh!tload of them. And the surface of the earth is hugely more complex (and thus causes more complex interactions with the atmosphere) than does the skin of an aircraft.

@42: That’s a fairly decent high level view of how CFD methods work and since the things climate and weather models simulate -air, chemistry, etc- are fluids, they certainly apply them similarly to that field.

However, it’s good to understand that the leap from simulating airflow over something the size of an airplane to global dynamics has multiple steps. And, at each step, simplifications -sometimes ignoring small effects, sometimes using ‘sub-grid’ methods- are made to the physical processes. Turbulence would be one example, since it’s still poorly understood and thus often approximated or ignored even in airflow simulations. If you start talking about simulating entire aircraft, then you have the chemical kinetics in the engine and almost everyone uses simplified methods for that because ab initio chemical calculations are simply not feasible. Or even worth it, as the goal of all of these is not to come up with ‘a’ right answer, but rather to develop models with predictive capabilities, and you can achieve that with these sorts of simplifications.

A case in point would be one of the relatively new areas of climate models is ‘cloud-resolving’ models – until recently, most models didn’t treat clouds well, if at all, and clearly that has an effect on the overall results. It doesn’t mean the previous generation of models were useless, it just means we’re refining them to give better and better predictive power. Not as in, “The weather on July 17th 2039 will be 73.2 degrees”, but rather, “In broad terms, we expect an increase of such-and-such by about 5% if X, Y and Z are true.”

And all of this is equally true with nearly every computational model these days. People simulating aortic valves approximate red blood cells because simulating them perfectly is not possible, but still, the research gives doctors insight into treatments that they wouldn’t have without the models. Going in for radiation therapy for cancer? Chances are someone will run a dosimetry calculation that has flaws, but is still predictive and helpful because it provides predictive capability. For that matter, the NNSA simulates our nuclear weapons stockpile to ensure things function properly without field tests – my guess is those guys feel reasonably certain in the predictive power of their imperfect models.

In a nutshell, while there’s still plenty to argue about in computational climate models, it’s ill-advised to dismiss the methods and science outright because the field has become a political football. It’s the same methods used for designing new fighter jets, launching rockets, developing better armor for soldiers and other things people put faith in all the time.

LC: thanks. And you’re correct – simulating a near-constant airflow over a relatively smooth surface like an aircraft is far less complex than doing the same over an irregular surface like the earth’s – one that often has multiple point and distributed heat and moisture sources, two of the things that drive weather. (smile)

Computational models are just that – models. They try to simulate reality. And most people have not idea how complex they are – or how much computation is required to run them.

Hondo (LC), that is true, and that’s just the beginning. Part of the problem is that we find factors unknown as we go. For example, many scientists acted as if there were just the five basic layers of the atmosphere — not so much in reality.

Then, there’s the unknown factor. To give a good example, on Spacelab there were a number of materials science experiments done where all theory and model predicted a very desirable outcome. Results did not match theory or models — turns out, there were a number of subtle phenomena that were masked by gravity that the boffins had no idea they were there until gravity could be removed.

Good modelling requires a lot of processing power and not hundreds of dimensions, but potentially millions to account for reality and a full knowledge of reality. From materials science to neurophysiology, we don’t yet have that and I suspect strongly we are not even close.

I do sometimes wonder if we might see a resurgence of a form of hybrid computer (analog and digital) to handle some of the computational load. Frankly, what little I understand of some chip design looks almost like they are doing a small bit of that.

The unknown factor in science includes things like the recent (Dec. 2013) discovery of argon hydrides in the Crab Nebula, where they are not supposed to be. Oh, how could this be? A noble gas so common on Earth, in a compound in SPACE, for pete’s sake? In a supernova remnant? Oh, noes!!! This is all wrong! How can this be? It throws the computer model off.

Good.

Like the gas giant in the wrong place, and finding argon hydrides where they shouldn’t exist, the poor old scientists rely far too much on computers and too little on their own intuition, which I’m beginning to think they stifle once they get a few hours toward an advanced degree.

EX-PH2: I could spot the good scientists from the bad at NASA simply by how they responded to unexpected data during a mission. From astrophysics to materials science, the good ones were astonished, delighted, and then off eagerly to try to figure out what they had seen. The bad ones tended to curse, deny, blame equipment/whatever, and sulked.

The ones who think we have it all figured out are over-degreed idiots.

Nice to know that they still exist, Laughing Wolf! Back in the dark ages when all we had was slide rules to compute various things, I did study quite a lot of science, both hard sciences and the social sciences. On both sides of the fence we were taught to study things for the joy of discovery and to expect others to discover new things which debunked whatever conclusions we might draw based on the knowledge we had at the time.

That old knowledge for it’s own sake thing, knowing full well that whatever we thought we knew today would be obsolete sooner or later. It served us all well.

Laughing Wolf, agreed – my sister is one of the ‘good’ ones. She took a trip to China to investigate traditional Chinese medicine, which included herbalism and acupuncture and concluded that her pre-med students had better be aware that it isn’t junk.

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About thisainthell

We are all military combat veterans and we write primarily from that perspective. Everyone who writes here has a Combat Infantry Badge, a Combat Medic Badge, a Combat Action Badge or a Combat Action Ribbon. We write about issues that matter to combat veterans..read more »